Carl Brooks Peters

C. Brooks Peters, who covered the outbreak of World War II from Berlin for The New York Times, died on Thursday at his apartment on the Upper West Side. He was 84.

Mr. Peters covered the early days of the war with a vivid style, producing some of the coverage that helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting in 1941.

Mr. Peters was a graduate of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and in 1936 he enrolled in the University of Berlin. The next year he joined The Times as a correspondent in Berlin, where he covered the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938.

Mr. Peters joined the Marines and fought in the Pacific campaign, ending the war as a major. He returned to The Times briefly, leaving in 1950. He then developed a public relations business. In the 1960's, he took up teaching. After his retirement from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1969, he pursued a career as a lecturer on World War II.

His first three marriages, to the former Georgianne Schenk, Phyllis Frederica Rothschild and Catharine Neiman Morton, all ended in divorce.

Mr. Peters is survived by his fourth wife, Dr. Jane F. Templeton, four sons, Alexander, Christoper and Frederick, all of Manhattan, and Elliot, of Berkeley, Calif., two daughters, Catharine Morton-Peters Oleson of St. Paul and Elizabeth Morton-Peters of York, Pa., and 10 grandchildren.